Increadibly Easy to Mistake for Loathing
by valtoni
Summary: Epilogue? What Epilogue? Ron unexpectedly finds himself on Millicent Bulstrode's doorstep in a future where nothing is easy and everything has gone wrong.


A/N:

Hullo. Here is a little story that began as something much smaller and more romantic... however I was in a stormy mood when inspiration stuck, and the original female lead morphed into Millicent, the cozy romantic setting morphed into a dark Halloween night, and what was supposed to be a one shot morphed into… well I don't know what it's going to be exactly. I don't believe I have ever before read a Ron/Millicent story, or at least none that made any sort of impression. However a few months ago I stumbled on a Neville/Millicent story that made me take a rather reluctant liking to this relatively unexplored character. Please read and review. If you would like to see any kind of continuation of this, I need to know. No silent participants allowed!

As usual all of these lovely characters belong solely to JK Rowling, I do not seek royalties, and I do not wish to piss anyone off.

The STORY:

* * *

It wasn't as if Millicent had anything better to do that night.

Lighting the first fire of the season, sitting in her favorite arm chair with a good book, and answering the almost continuous string of the most perfectly clichéd 'Ding-dongs' known to man made up a rather pleasant Halloween night, actually. The little monsters had begun coming round before sunset, and at ten to nine her candy bowl was nearly empty. And that had almost nothing to do with the small mountain of empty chocolate wrappers setting on the end table next to her cup of tea.

She got up and stretched, pulling the hair tie out of her pony tail and absentmindedly combing her fingers through her thick, wavy mane. She yawned before walking over to the front window. There hadn't been a ring for almost ten minutes: the longest reprieve since the onslaught began, and she expected to see that the neighborhood had calmed somewhat. But no; there was still a steady stream of princesses and vampires and (she softly snorted) witches along with their accompanying adults flitting about beneath the yellow glow of the street lights. She watched for a minute or so, barely registering that none of these muggles were even glancing at her house before locking the door. She flicked off the porch-light (the international Halloween symbol for "Go away! No more candy") and popped the last fun sized three musketeers into her mouth.

She had just begun to levitate another log onto the fire when she heard a scream.

Outside every light on the street had gone out. One particularly loud parent had apparently misplaced their child in the darkness, and Millicent could just make out the vague shadows of children clinging to one another as they felt their way along the sidewalk. Suddenly a very loud banging began at her front door. She clutched her wand in a tightly closed fist and edged toward the door. She bellowed, in as brave a voice as she could muster,

"No more candy here! Now go away. We're sleeping."

The banging stopped and a vaguely familiar male voice said,

"I don't want candy, for Merlin's sake, I want a safe house that lets their order members in!"

She didn't respond immediately, but when whoever it was muttered, "Dammit, looks like a muggle neighborhood, Must've apparated wonky…" she opened the door.

A tall man was standing on her top step, turned at the waist as he surveyed the darkened street over his shoulder. His wand hung loosely in his hand. When he turned back towards the door, he found his face only inches from her wand. Millicent tried to look at him, but couldn't see anything defining in the dim. It seemed as though he was trying to recognize her as well, because he leaned towards her. She felt him tense when she dug the tip of her wand into the hollow beneath his jaw, but after just a moment he began to relax and fumble for something in his pocket. There was a 'click' and the street lights re-light. He certainly looked every bit as confused as she felt, and they both stared at each other stupidly for a second before saying simultaneously,

"You?"

* * *

There on her doorstep stood Ron Weasley. As soon as she withdrew her wand from where it was dug into the side of his neck, he turned once again to look over his shoulder. And there at the end of the block, ironically inconspicuous amidst the flurry of costumes, stood two Death Eaters, unmistakable in their cloaks and masks to anyone who was unfortunate to have met them before. She only paled slightly before grabbing Weasley by the front of his shirt and hauling him over the threshold.

Without invitation, he began systematically turning out every light in the room before going to the bank of windows that looked out on to the street and peeking out the curtains, wand drawn. She rolled her eyes and turned the Tiffany-knock off floor lamp back on. Weasley fell to a crouch and turned to glare fiercely at her,

"Turn that damn light off, I'd like to avoid another fight tonight if I can help it,"

She momentarily forgot what she was about to say. With him slouched against the opposite wall with his head resting on the windowsill and his long legs splayed out in front of him, Millicent said the first thing that popped into her head,

"You look like shit, Weasel."

And it was true. His carrot-top, slightly shaggier than she remembered it from Hogwarts was dark with sweat, and he was deathly pale. There were small cuts and bruises up and down the length of his arms and his dirty black tee-shirt had a number of holes in it. And now, looking up at her, he appeared to still be trying to catch his breath.

He didn't respond, but rather dug the heel of his left hand into his eye, and he sounded as tired as he looked when he said,

"Just… please. I don't have another round in me."

"Relax," She lightly shook her head as what she had been trying to say earlier popped back into it. "Dumbledore placed the Fiedelus Charm himself." He had said it would not go into effect until the need arose, she supposed that accounted for the door-bell lull.

Ron gave a disbelieving little scoff but shrugged and let his head fall back against the glass with an almost painful sounding 'bonk.'

"Dumbledore, huh?"

His eyes followed her as she squished back into her chair and took a sip of her luke-warm oolong.

"You don't believe me? Honestly. Ungrateful, godamned holier-than-thou Gryffindors, so…"

But her incensed ramble was cut off… probably for the best since the culmination of her interrupted evening, and playing host to such a thoroughly unwelcome guest probably could have fueled her for hours to come. He was laughing.

"No, Bulstrode, god. Just the opposite actually." His deep chuckle continued. "I mean, firstly, It's not like I have a choice here is it? I apparated to the nearest Order safe house, and ended up here, so a safe house I presume it to be."

She was looking at him with one eyebrow lifted, the same expression on her face that she would have given to a hair on a public toilet seat. But he continued to laugh.

"I mean, You-Know-Who reincarnated could have opened the door, and I probably would have just thought 'OK, why not?'

He momentarily lost the capacity for speech as his laughs turned silent, his eyes squeezed shut, and his long torso shook with laughter.

She couldn't help but feel her mouth hitch up a bit at the sides… hopefully in what was a laugh of disdain, not camaraderie.

He finally caught his breath with a ridiculously high pitched squeak, and exhaled shakily before trying to complete his thought.

"It's just funny. Nothing surprises me anymore."

She didn't particularly have anything to say to this, and Millicent was never one to expand beyond necessary conversation. However she knit her brows as she thought that if one of the golden trio, one of Hogwart's Heros, had so much as heard a rumor that she wasn't the Evil Slytherin Amazon they assumed her to be two years ago when they were at school together, they would have indignantly and insistently questioned her to death about the whys and the wherefores. They would have theorized wildly and fabricated reasons to question her veracity.

So she assumed that she was happy that all Weasley appeared to be doing was crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back onto the sill with his eyes closed. After all, she hadn't really wanted to explain to anyone why she had suddenly dropped out of Hogwarts before her seventh year, why she was living alone in the house she had grown up in, why she had looked up into the eyes of Professor Albus Dumbledore and cried one night so long ago when he showed up at her house at the most inopportune, and as it turned out to be, opportune time. She had cried openly for the first time in her life that night. After that, all she wanted to do was stay ensconced in her own little world. Yes she had agreed to help Dumbledore's cause that night, but only in the most minor way. She would have rather not taken any notice of the war. And she had done a remarkably good job of falling off the face of the earth while it was going on. She had managed, in the fifteen months since it happened to not talk to anybody at all… except of course the cursory small talk required of a shop girl, and the casual word here and there to a neighbor or clerk. No, as she finally abandoned the icy dregs of her tea as a lost cause and looked down at Weasley who was apparently napping on her living room floor, she realized,

"You're the first Wizard I've seen in over a year."

His eyes cracked open and he shot a furtive glance her way… And oh shit, she'd said that out loud.

She hadn't meant it as a response to his last statement… she hadn't even meant to vocalize it, but he seemed to take it as the beginning of a conversation.

"Hm," he laughed softly. "Ok, so maybe _that_ does surprise me a bit."

_Leave it there Weasley, drop it, don't even think about asking any foll…_

"A year, huh? So what, that would be about seventh year. Did you drop out."

"Drop it Weasel-by!" She hadn't meant to snap that loudly. The tea-cup in her hand dropped onto her lap and than hit the floor.

His ears took on a pink tinge, and he held his hands up in surrender.

"Jesus, woman, you brought it up."

She opened her mouth to retort, but closed it immediately… she _had_ brought it up.

She was picking up her cup and scrubbing the wet patch on her thigh, and retreating towards the kitchen, desperately desiring a change of subject.

"Tea?"

"Yes, thank you." He had gotten up and followed her. She turned on the gas under the kettle and sat down on a stool at the little breakfast bar on the island opposite the stove. She pulled one knee into her chest, as she always did whilst sitting in the kitchen, and for some reason, with Weasley leaning comfortably up against the low arched entrance to the room looking at her, it suddenly occurred to her that sitting like that made her thigh look even thicker than it was, and she immediately lowered it. She certainly didn't miss having company, and the uncomfortable feeling she always got when anyone was in her house. Millicent had never been completely comfortable around anyone but herself… with the possible exception of her father.

And Weasley wasn't making it any better by continuing to look at her like that… like he was about to laugh.

She was about to ask him what the hell his problem was (a retort she had used since about the age of six when anyone, male or female so much as glanced at her) when she looked down, and saw to her horror a large wet spot on her left breast left by her tea-soaked thigh.

'God dammit," she mumbled as she attempted to dry it with her wand.

He was definitely stifling a laugh now. She glared at him.

"That's it Weasley: barge in uninvited to my house, ruin my evening, drink my tea and _laugh_ at me. That's just the sort of behavior one should expect. Uncouth, illmannered…."

"Sorry. Sorry. You're right, I'm sorry." But his eyes were still glittering with laughter as their gaze dropped to her chest, and the stretched out, slightly off-colored spot on her shirt.

"Oh, you're one to laugh." And she walked over and poked a finger into one of the smallest holes in his shirt, just below his right armpit. He squirmed away. Apparently what she had thought would be a sharp jab in the ribs, he found tickly.

The teapot began whistling, and as she poured, she decided that she had better ask her question before he decided to continue the interrogation he began in the living room.

_Interrogation? He barely got a simple question out before I bit his head off… I really must stop being so prickly. _

"So what the hell happened to you tonight?"

He sat down on the stool next to the one she had just vacated and took a contemplative sip of tea.

"More of the same. Since You-Know-Who went down, you know, it's been impossible to find 'em unless they _want _to find you, and once that happens, well, it's never exactly pretty is it?"

"I… wait… find them. You mean Death Eaters? I thought…"

But she didn't really know what she thought. She supposed that she hadn't thought about it, she just believed that the morning after the Battle of Hogwarts everything was cured. Seeing Death Eaters loitering on the end of her block had been about as incongruous with her reality as becoming a Prima Ballerina: not damn likely.

"What, you believe that bunk their printing in the Prophet?"He was joking and from the tone of this voice he obviously couldn't think anything was more ridiculous… and than he caught the look on her face. Her deep brown eyes were looking steadily at him across the kitchen island, hungry for information.

"You do." His voice had dropped to barely above a whisper. "You do think that they're gone… Millicent, do you have any idea what's going on out there?"

She didn't respond immediately. She took her time taking the teabag out of her cup, squeezing it into a tight little ball, and depositing it on a saucer for re-use before coming back around the island to her stool.

The red chili pepper lights strung about the window over the sink were about half burnt out, and both Ron and Millicent were looking at their dim, patchy glow rather than at each other.

"It's bad?" She asked in a rough undertone.

She didn't see him nod, but she felt it.

And so Ron told her about how nothing had been solved with the battle of Hogwarts, how Voldemort's death had even compounded the issue. They had been wrong in assuming that theirs was a localized problem. Wizards the world over apparently saw Muggles as expendable. It is a sociological truth that two fundamentally different groups of people cannot coexist peacefully. Sects in Russia, South America, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe may not have been under Voldemort's control, but they certainly operated under the same ideology. He told her of a small Muggle village in Burma that had been overtaken by a gang of local Wizards. It's inhabitants were forced to give up all of their possessions and transferred into a three block radius… a ghetto. They provided free manual labor. Any who were to old or weak, young or sick to work: any who didn't pass the selection were systematically eliminated.

He was wooden as he told her this; nothing but a pale mask of a man with defeated eyes. But his voice didn't hitch, and his gaze didn't drift from the flickering red of the lights.

Millicent's knee was pulled up under her chin again, her large, strong hands grasped tightly around it. She finally turned her head to look at the man she was slowly realizing that she barely knew. He blinked and turned away from the lights. For the first time that evening his stormy blue eyes caught her gaze.

"And word spread after we got him. Dark wizards from all over the world realized that someone was trying to stand up to their cause. England caught their attention. And now we are the resistance to a global campaign."

He stared blankly into the bottom of his tea cup for what seemed like a lifetime, and than,

"And oh shit, they're probably wondering where I am! I was supposed to report back like two hours ago, but than with the attack, and the apparating here…"

He was striding into her living room, rummaging around on the mantle for something.

"God damn it, where is the floo powder?"

"I-" she cleared her throat. She hadn't said a word in well over an hour and it was scratchy and dry.

"I didn't renew the connection last year."

He looked at her like she was crazy.

"I haven't exactly wanted company."

"But this is a Safe House, you had to guess you'd need it eventually!"

"Well…" She could definitely foresee a yelling match in the future if things kept shaping up the way they were. She breathed through her nose, trying her best to quell the annoyance.

"…No one ever used it before… and since I didn't even know the Order was still operating, I obviously guessed that a safe-house for its members would no longer be necessary."

He shrugged. She sighed… tempers like theirs were best left in opposite hemispheres.

"_Now_,_"_ she continued, "Would you like to use my phone."

His ears pinked. "I, um, I don't think we have one."

She sat down on the edge of her chair, knees apart, forearms resting on her thighs. Now it was her turn to look at him like he was crazy.

"Owl?" he asked hopefully.

"Don't have one. Remember? I've been out of touch with the Wizarding World for eons, numbskull!"

"Ok, Ok, put the claws away there, tiger."

She didn't appreciate being called a tiger and didn't even attempt to soften the venom in her voice when she said,

"Well than what the hell do you suppose we do?"

He looked at her with surprising cool for someone who had just been shrieked at.

"I suppose that we do what you promised Dumbledore you'd do: provide an Order Member with a safe house. "

She thought that's what she _had_ been doing all evening, but than thought better of saying that… it would only nettle him.

"Meaning?"

He was sitting on her hearth, back to the dying embers of her long forgotten fire and his face turned down… but even so she caught a small pink tinge of embarrassment when he said matter-of-factly to the rug,

"Well, I haven't slept for thirty six hours."

* * *

She had never once played host to an overnight guest in her house before, but she found that showing him up the stairs and pointing out the bathroom was no chore. She opened the door to her parent's room, and watched at the entrance as he strode in, nodding appreciatively and looking longingly at the bed. She swallowed a small lump before saying curtly, "Sleep well, we'll just figure something out tomorrow," and shutting the door.

She leaned her head back against the dark wood, eyes shut, trying desperately to ignore the disgustingly sentimental thought that had wormed its way into her head:

It was the first time anyone had stepped foot in that room for fifteen months.


End file.
